Translator: Gabriela Masfarre Reviewer: antonella broglia
In moments of change, the answers change,
but the questions also change.
Questions that were easy become difficult.
Questions that were difficult become very easy.
Above all, new questions come up.
Let's start with questions
that seemed to be easy and suddenly become difficult.
Profession?
Each time the notary asks about my profession I make up a random one.
Lately, I like to say "astronaut".
"Prove me that I'm not."
Why?
I don't know about you,
but I had to reinvent myself many times throughout my life.
I also think that if the government wants to know my job, they should give me a job.
Another difficult question: craft?
You may have a craft today,
but you don't know what will be your job tomorrow.
They tell us
that algorithms, robots, machines are going to change and make disappear
47% of the jobs we know in the next years.
What does this mean?
That most of the jobs in production, distribution, administration
even in sales, which seems very personal,
can disappear in the next years.
Therefore, a question that seemed simple has become difficult, too.
Another very simple question has become very difficult: job?
This robot cleans airports.
With a 20% of unemployment or a 50% youth unemployment,
questions related to jobs have become uncomfortable, difficult,
and in many cases, impossible.
But we're also going to talk about some questions
that used to be very difficult and have now become very simple.
For example: what do you want to know?
Wikipedia, but also YouTube, or Khan Academy allow you access to what you want,
and they do it in a very innovative way:
each person shares whatever she knows,
we organize it under a set of rules, and we make it available to everyone.
For you to get an idea,
Wikipedia has been written with 1% of the time
Americans spend watching TV during one year.
With this potential – imagine, 1% of the time –
it's capable of being the 7th site in the world
and to provide knowledge to 500 million people per month.
What a level of abundance!
Another question that has become simple: where do you want to go?
Blablacar offers to anyone who is driving from one city to another
and who has got spare seats,
to publish and helps them find people
who want to share the route and split costs.
BlablaCar transports already 2 million passengers in Europe every month.
Two million passengers - for you to get an idea -
is a third of the bus traffic between cities in Spain.
Two million passengers - what the French train was telling us -
is that BlablaCar has already captured
5% of the train traffic between cities in France.
Without investment, buying cars or training people.
It's another category of economy.
Another difficult question that turned easy:
what do you want to produce?
Obama invites us to make our dreams, to produce them in 3D.
Additive fabrication process, the fabrication object by object
allows us to produce low cost, the cost of the raw material,
- more than 100 materials can be already used -
allows us to produce anything at a very low cost.
Long series or short series. Simple products or complex products.
A silly example:
you can produce a whistle with the ball already inside.
There is no need to produce two parts and put the small ball inside.
We said there are easy questions and difficult ones,
we see that we are entering into a new mode of production.
We are going to call it citizen production,
the mode of citizen production.
What are we observing?
A very different efficiency level.
We are able to produce much more with much less,
transport, accommodation, whatever.
That we are able to generate abundance where there used to be scarcity
in the fields of knowledge, design
that we are able to pull from trust sources
beyond the institutions and organizations we already know.
Of course yes, any change also implies changes in other things.
We're also starting to see that not always bigger is better.
We're also starting to see that not everyone will get a traditional job.
We're also starting to see the need to give value
to those things that we don't know how to measure or pay with money.
What's happening?
We're facing a total economic change.
We're facing changes in the models, changes in the factors of production.
Any economy is defined
by a specific combination of capital, work, and available resources.
All changing at the same time.
Let's start with the capital. Money.
We need less and less money to start things.
Look how has the need for money decreased
with platforms like Google or YouTube, with Amazon Web Service
that allows you to create a shop and scale it with very little effort,
the costs in money have decreased dramatically.
But on top of that,
we've got the crowdfunding that allows us to finance things,
we've currencies like Bitcoin, that is based on Blockchain,
or complementary and neighborhood currencies
that allow you to get money from different sources.
The second source of capital is trust.
It's happening in Spain, but also in other countries,
citizens do no longer trust official institutions:
politicians, parliaments, or even the media.
We trust civil society, we trust each other.
There is a revolution in trust.
Social networks allow us to generate trust between strangers.
A novelty for humans.
And the open invites us to trust the rules.
Rules that are open to everyone and that we can all change.
We talked about capital and work.
This is the average citizen of the world.
We live in Europe, in Spain,
and we've got this feeling that everyone is old,
and that we are all living like this.
But the average world citizen according to National Geographic
is 28 years old, is young, educated, connected,
has got knowledge, and ambition, and wants to change things globally.
We're not only young, connected, and educated,
we also have got new capacities.
Citizens are not only consumers.
We, the citizens know how to share our ideas,
how to share our knowledge and how to share our assets.
We have learned to remix the things we have access to.
We have got the capacity, and we practice it it all the time,
to finance projects that we don't know
if traditional financing institutions would have financed.
We've got the capacity, and we use it, to produce accommodation, transport,
energy, science, or anything we may think of.
We've got the capacity, more and more, to create value between us
and to divide the benefits according to the results.
Who's this new economic agent? It's the citizen producer.
It's any of us when we put in value what we've got, what we know,
what we like in exchange for a pat on the back;
in exchange for recognition or in exchange for global resource euros.
Because what has happened is that the optimal economical scale
for many things is one,
a hotel with one room; a restaurant with one table;
a transportation company with one seat;
a multinational craftsman of only one person.
And now, the new questions.
We said, easy questions become difficult,
difficult questions become easy.
And many new questions.
For example: income or salary?
What we've got all clear is that to be alive we need income.
And we're starting to see clearly that there won't be jobs for everyone.
We start to see in this new economy, the collaborative economy,
that the income per hour of the better rated people
is higher than a classic job.
You don't have the security nor the stability of a classic job.
"Yes but, how many are they?"
We are millions in most of the researched countries.
Between the 40-50% of the people have either shared something
using traditional platforms such as Craiglist or eBay,
or in the new generation of mobile platforms.
"Yes, but they must be always the same people!"
Apparently not, apparently it is contagious.
When the people, citizens start to discover
a different way to create value,
different ways to give value to what we own,
other sources of trust,
and different ways to generate activity among us
in a way, socially more interesting and probably more sustainable,
it becomes a contagious phenomenon.
"It is happening in weird places."
It is not, it is extending from country to country,
among the occidental countries for now,
and in developing world with different values and different ways.
"But this is a marginal thing…" It is not.
Because when citizens get together to create something,
we have got the capacity to transform the system as a whole.
You know that in Spain we are threatened if we produce or storage our own energy.
In other countries like Germany, where curiously they've got less sun,
citizens have got the freedom to install their capacity and share it.
The result is
nearly 50% of the renewable energy infrastructure in Germany
is not owned by either energy companies or financial funds,
it belongs to citizens like us
that are doing an energy revolution roof by roof, house by house.
This is why the question we should be doing ourselves,
"How will these changes affect me?"
Because it is affecting, and it has the potential to affect, this third logic,
this citizen mode of production,
energy, education, health, science, politics, companies,
technology, traveling, production, industry.
Because I think we're very close, as the mayor of Seoul proposes,
to have a lifestyle coherent with common sense.
Because I think we're starting to understand,
and we all can contribute to a new way of production
that is designed to generate abundance and efficiency
and to develop mutual trust among us.
Thank you.
(Applause)